Dr. Wheeler's Final Behind The Lines Column from Strategic Investment

This month we’re going to focus upon books on Islam.  The first thing to do in this regard, however, is to go into the To The Point  Archives and read the Myth of Mecca article.  It explains how the religion of Islam was invented as a religious rationale to justify Arab imperialism.  At the end of that article, you’ll see a list of sources, all of which I strongly recommend as works of serious professional scholarship:

 • Al-Rawandi, I.M. Origins of Islam:  A Critical Look at the Sources.  Prometheus, 2000 • Crone, P.M.  Meccan Trade and the Rise of Islam.  Oxford, 1987.** • Newby, G.D. The Making of the Last Prophet:  A Reconstruction of the Earliest Biography of Mohammed.  Columbia, 1989. • Wansbrough, J. Quranic Studies:  Sources and Methods of Scriptural Interpretation.  Oxford, 1977.** • Warraq, I. M. The Quest for the Historical Muhammad.  Prometheus, 2000.*

[A * denotes that it is currently available at Amazon — www.amazon.com — while ** means Amazon lists it as out of print but possibly available used.  All of the books below are in stock at Amazon.]

There are a number of “popular” books (written for the “intelligent layman” rather than the academic scholar) on Islam currently out now.  Here are three I can personally recommend to you:

 • What Went Wrong? by Bernard Lewis.  Oxford, 2002.  Lewis teaches at Princeton and is the premier historian of the Middle East.  There is nobody better in explaining the historical path of Islam from medieval triumph to contemporary failure.

 • Islam Unveiled by Robert Spencer.  Encounter, 2002.  A very readable critical analysis of basic Islamic tenets.  Highly useful are the repeated parallels between Islamic and Soviet ideology.

 • The Sword of the Prophet by Serge Trifkovic.  Regina Orthodox, 2002.  This is another critical analysis of Islamic history and morals, coupled with a discussion of Western appeasement of Islam.  One weakness is the author’s unrelieved vitriol towards the Turks.

Talking about vitriol, nothing can match Oriana Fallaci’s The Rage and the Pride (Rizzoli, 2002).  There is nothing calm and dispassionate here.  It is a total cri du coeur, cry of the heart., and it needs to be read by every member of Western Civilization.

Lastly, I’d like to suggest a work of world class scholarship, Islam and Dhimmitude by Bat Ye’or (Farleigh Dickinson, 2002).  Ye’or is the foremost expert on “dhimmitude,” second-class citizenship of Jews and Christians subjected to Islamic rule over the last 1400 years.  She uses her prodigious historical erudition to focus upon Western Europe’s acceptance of dhimmitude today in its relationship with Islam.  This is a work of major importance.

[Written ten days after the start of The War in Iraq, March 31, 2003]Let me say it straight. I am almost sixty years old, and I have never in my life been prouder to be an American than I am today.I was talking to my friend Tony Blankley, editorial editor of the Washington Times, the other day, and when I compared George Bush to Ronald Reagan, Tony replied, “It may turn out to be the other way around.”

Doomsday scenarios were ever-popular during the Cold War. But the reality was that if a nuclear missile hit a U.S. city, we would know for sure who launched it: the Soviets. Thus we knew against whom to retaliate. And thus the Cold War was conducted without a single nuclear shot fired.We are now facing a threat an order of magnitude or greater than that of the Cold War. What if a nuclear bomb goes off in a U.S. city and we're not sure who did it, so we don't know against whom to retaliate?

STRATEGIC INVESTMENT, January 2003

One hundred and sixty years ago, in 1843, the Commissioner of the US Patent Office, Henry Ellsworth, reported to Congress:  “The advancement of the arts, from year to year, taxes our credulity and seems to presage the arrival of that period when human improvement must end.”  (This is the source of the spurious quote attributed in 1899 to Ellsworth’s successor, Charles Duell, who never said “Everything that can be invented has been invented”).

Human improvement did not come to an end in 1843, nor will it in 2003.  In fact, I think 2003 is going to be a great year for the US economy.  Not spectacular.  But I’m willing to bet a glass of Guinness at the Irish Times bar on Capitol Hill that the Dow, S&P 500, and NASDAQ will all be higher at the end of 2003 than they were at the start.

There are two basic reasons for this, and they are both named George W. Bush.  GW is determined not to make his Dad’s mistake, and knows voters must perceive the economy has been going well for many months, up to a year, before he runs for reelection.  Further — and here’s the key — his strategy for accomplishing this is to get the government out of the way, stimulating the economy by decreasing tax and regulatory burdens on businesses and investors, and not through socialist subsidies.

In other words, GW’s economic policy is to give the real engines of growth — entrepreneurs and small businesses — more freedom to prosper.  The timing couldn’t be better.  The bubble — and its bursting — has come and gone.  Both are over.  The entrepreneurs who are stepping up now aren’t the flashy, arrogant kids of the Dot-com Age.  They are more sober and experienced, i.e., grown-up.  They are coming up with solid technology and business plans that make sense and will make a lot of money. 

A good example is Wayne Pierzga.  He and his partners are level-headed engineers who’ve been around the entrepreneurial block, and know the electro-magnetic spectrum inside and out.  They’ve got a proprietary technology to capitalize big-time on a niche of the wireless communications market no one else has.

Instead of launching billion-dollar satellites or erecting gazillions of ground-based repeater towers, they’re going to put low-cost, lightweight radio repeaters on existing aircraft flying normal flight routes.  Such repeaters on only 14 aircraft at any given time (with 2 ground stations) will give full coverage for the entire US east of the Mississippi, providing a high-speed (240+kbs DSL equivalent) Internet and voice connection for business jet and commercial airline passengers, and for the entire shipping industry (cargo planes, trains, trucks, and ships).

In talking to Wayne, what struck me immediately was not just the enormous financial potential of his technology but its national security implications.  Every one of the countless shipping containers that enters the US daily is a possible security threat, containing, say, a “dirty bomb” capable of ruining a city.  A small tracking device placed on a container signaling Wayne’s system will tell the shipper where it is in real time and if it’s being opened after Customs inspection.  Warren Buffet (who owns NetJet), and Fred Smith (who runs FedEx) may have to get in line behind Tom Ridge (who runs the new Homeland Security Agency) to see Wayne.

I found out about Wayne through a VC firm that specializes in discovering start-ups with both proven business savvy and proprietary technology with a fabulous upside — the Artemis Strategy Fund in Bethesda, Maryland.  The Artemis team knows what it’s doing more than any other VC outfit I’m aware of.  Amidst the myriad of VC flame-outs and retrenching, Artemis developed a smarter strategy that wasn’t impacted like so many recent VC debacles.  Give Jim DeMocker a call at Artemis — 301-657-6222 — if you’d like to learn more about Wayne Pierzga’s Aegeus company or get a report on the Artemis investment strategy.

With GW now running the whole Washington show, he is going to make it far easier for folks like Wayne and at Artemis to revitalize the US economy.  The latent ingenuity, creativity, and sheer raw ability of so many Americans is staggering.  All they need is for the government to take away the regulatory and tax obstacles it sets on the road.  You watch.  A lot of these ingenious entrepreneurs are going to be unleashed in 2003, and a lot of investors are going to make money with them.  It’s our job here at SI to help you be one of them.  This is the start of my 17th year for SI, with my first article appearing in the January 1987 issue.  I wish you a free, healthy, and prosperous 2003 — and come January 2004, we can talk about it over a Guinness at the Irish Times.

One of the meta-reasons America won the Cold War is that Russians play chess, while Americans play poker. Chess demands great skill and intelligence, particularly at developing complex long-range strategies and anticipating your opponent's moves.  But it bears little resemblance to life in the real world.  It is completely static and open.  Nothing is hidden.  Poker is very different.  You have to guess what your opponent has and the extent to which he is bluffing.  In business, in politics, in life in general, the folks who know how to play poker will almost always fare better than those who know how to play chess.

Across the world, today's newspapers carried front-page headlines similar to that of the Washington Times:  "Russia Remains Silent on Deadly Knockout Gas."  The mystery of the Knockout Gas's identity has been solved.

In the deepest heart of the Gobi Desert of Mongolia, just south of the Flaming Cliffs where Roy Chapman Andrews discovered dinosaur eggs in the 1920s, there is a naked spine of mountains called the Gurvan Saihan. In the Gurvan Saihan there is a valley called Yol Alyn, the Vulture’s Mouth. And in the Vulture’s Mouth, there is a glacier.

It is not a big glacier, the ice buildup of a stream that refuses to melt even in the heat of the Gobi summer. But it is a glacier nonetheless, thick enough for my son Jackson and I to walk on for more than a mile. A glacier in the Gobi is an eerie anomaly — but no more so than a statue in the city center of Ulan Bator, Mongolia’s capital.

For 70 years, from 1921 to 1991, Mongolia was a Communist dictatorship, a colony of the Soviet Union. Closed off from the world, it became a hidden sinkhole of despotism ruled by such tyrants as Choibalsan, the Mongolian Stalin. Only with the collapse of the Soviet Empire was Mongolia allowed to shake off the shackles of oppression and become free.

So, free it became, with democratic elections and a surge toward a free-market economy. Yet in a park across from the Ulan Bator Hotel, the city’s largest, there remains a statue of the evil monster who placed Mongolia in chains: Vladimir Lenin. Coming upon a statue — undamaged and pristine — of Lenin in a country free of his depraved legacy is no more palatable than a statue of Hitler in the center of Berlin. Yet there it is, a monument to enslavement that won’t melt in the sunlight of freedom, like a glacier that won’t melt in the Gobi.

One of the most depressing books for an incorrigible optimist like me to read is Erich Fromm’s The Fear of Freedom. I read it decades ago and was scandalized by Fromm’s assertion that most people are afraid of freedom and will reject it even if handed to them on a platter. Fromm would sardonically smile at the spectacle of how so many former Soviet colonies have handled their freedom since it was given to them a decade ago. From Prague and Budapest to Ulan Bator, people free to vote have elected their Communist slavemasters back into power.

Reluctant as I was to admit Fromm’s devastating insight, years ago I opted for American exceptionalism. For Fromm never said everyone by human nature was afraid to be free, just lots of folks were. By offering just that freedom that so many were afraid of, America attracted those who weren’t. So America, at least, wasn’t afraid of freedom, and Fromm was wrong, at least, about America. But like so much else about America that liberals have destroyed, liberals are destroying this too.

By providing welfare programs and government handouts to immigrants — even, or rather especially, to illegal ones — America attracts parasites and not producers. And by spinning a web of fascist anti-competitive rules and regulations, liberals have ensnared the freedom of us all.

I regard liberals as enemies of freedom, who can be relied upon to degrade the institutions and advocates of freedom at every opportunity. They will invariably do their best to invalidate economic freedom with Time magazine cover stories like “Can US Style Capitalism Survive?” and smear the character of a president whose decency and honor are the exact opposite of his predecessor’s.

The essence of Bill Clinton’s character and presidency was irresponsibility. The result was the moral debasement of our culture and the financial debasement of our economy. The latter was a binge the aftermath of which we are now enduring as the Clinton Hangover. Yet folks hate to be told to sober up. It is so much more fun to be irresponsible, to get morally and economically drunk, than to be straight and sober. It is so much easier for liberals to scapegoat capitalism itself, and shift the blame from the perpetrator to his successor trying hard to clean up the mess.

So, will it work? The liberals tirelessly assaulted the abilities of the greatest president of modern times, Ronald Reagan. Yet Reagan triumphed and his historical stature continues to grow. The liberals failed in their attack on Reagan, and I — ever the optimist — believe they will ultimately fail in the attack on George W. Bush.

I also believe they will fail in their current calumny on capitalism. First on general grounds: Not only does capitalism work, it’s the only economic system that does work. Socialism has blindingly failed, and so has every other alternative as well. Second on particular grounds: Every binge has a letdown, and for the extravagance of the former, what we are undergoing now is amazingly mild. It shall pass, and soon.

But soon enough, in time to enable GW’s party to retain the House and regain the Senate this November? No one could claim, given their recent performance, that Republicans are as much friends of freedom, resisting the expansion of government, as the Democrats are the opposite. Nonetheless, Democrat control of the House would be a straightforward disaster for freedom in America.

Freedom in America will always be under threat. Like the glacier in the Gobi, anti-capitalism will not melt away no matter how much the sun of capitalistic prosperity beats down upon it. Like the glacier, it will wax and wane.

In the winter, the Gobi freezes with icy winds blasting from Siberia. The liberals, the Democrats, the anti-capitalists, are making every effort to wax now. Let us hope there are enough people still in America to prove Fromm wrong, enough to ensure that the enemies of freedom and capitalism become little more than an odd curiosity, like a glacier in the Gobi Desert.